Performance

Benchmarks of BOOST_METAPARSE_STRING

Increasing string length
Increasing number of strings
Increasing string length limit

Measurements related to the performance of the BOOST_METAPARSE_STRING macro.

Increasing string length

128 strings with increasing length. Measured on a Linux-3.13.0-24-generic-x86_64-with-Ubuntu-14.04-trusty host with 16 GB memory. Compiler used: gcc 4.8.5.

Increasing number of strings

Increasing number of strings with 64 length. Measured on a Linux-3.13.0-24-generic-x86_64-with-Ubuntu-14.04-trusty host with 16 GB memory. Compiler used: gcc 4.8.5.

Increasing string length limit

100 one character long strings with increasing maximum length. Measured on a Linux-3.13.0-24-generic-x86_64-with-Ubuntu-14.04-trusty host with 16 GB memory. Compiler used: gcc 4.8.5.

Parsers work at compile-time, thus their performance affects compilation speed. This section shows measurements of compilation time using Metaparse. The measurements were done on a Linux laptop with an 1.6 GHz Atom processor and 1 GB memory. The measurements were done using GCC 4.6.1 with -std=c++0x and no optimisation. Compilation speed was measured using the time utility.

To measure a non-trivial parser, the printf example program were used for measurements. Here is a list of the printf calls and their compilation speed (user output of time):

Table 23.1. Printf compilation speed

type-safe `printf` call	Compilation speed (s)
No compile-time parsing (just the includes and an empty `main`)	3.51
`printf<BOOST_METAPARSE_STRING("%f")>(1.0)`	4.95
`printf<BOOST_METAPARSE_STRING("%f%f")>(1.0, 2.0)`	5.26
`printf<BOOST_METAPARSE_STRING("%f%f%f")>(1.0, 2.0, 3.0)`	5.50
`printf<BOOST_METAPARSE_STRING("%f%f%f%f")>(1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0)`	5.82
`printf<BOOST_METAPARSE_STRING("%f%f%f%f%f")>(1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0)`	6.07

Further measurements

Further measurements can be found in the following paper:

Zoltán Porkoláb, Ábel Sinkovics:
Domain-specific Language Integration with Compile-time Parser Generator Library
In Eelco Visser, Jaakko Järvi, editors, Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Generative programming and component engineering (GPCE 2010). ACM, October 2010, pp. 137-146.